


Vocab building strategies

by twofrontteethstillcrooked



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Drabble, M/M, Or drabble continued
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 15:13:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3900916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofrontteethstillcrooked/pseuds/twofrontteethstillcrooked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The thing was, if Adam thought about it, he couldn't think about it.</i>
</p>
<p>A follow up, drabble-style, to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/3812791">Physics homework</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vocab building strategies

_St. Agnes Rectory_

_Saturday_

Adam wondered what it said about his psyche that when he opened his eyes this memory was what floated into his consciousness:

He was standing in line behind a middle aged woman at the grocery store. She was unloading her cart and grousing at a twenty-something guy with an oily pink face. Twenty-something was probably the son. He was wrangling a six-pack of Big Red bottles onto the check-out conveyor.

Unhappy mother said to her son, "Anyone who isn't brave enough to say the word 'gynecologist' isn't old enough to get married." Then she slammed a can of Sloppy Joe sauce down on the conveyor.

Two years later Adam pondered the random remembrance as he slowly rolled off his mattress, stood and stretched (and wished his knees wouldn't pop), and padded to his tiny bathroom. He shut the door, turned on the light, leaned against the door; not looking in the mirror would be better than looking in the mirror. He needed to bathe and brush his teeth. He needed to stay in the tiny bathroom until the other person sleeping on the mattress woke up and went home.

"Hurry up, Parrish," the other person said while pounding his fist on the bathroom door, a sneaky simultaneous thump that made Adam lurch about three feet into the air and crack his ankle on the corner of the sink cabinet.

"Motherfff-- _ow_ ," Adam hissed, opening the door to confront the smirking visage of this interloper. He continued to be amazed at how many different kinds of smirks Ronan could produce. He was a smirk legend.

"Gotta shake the dew off the lily," Ronan said, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

"Gross," Adam said as Ronan raced past him.

Confronted with his own closed bathroom door, Adam stretched some more and touched the top of the doorframe with his fingertips. They came away dusty, which reminded him he had never wiped down the top of any doorframe he was currently obligated to take care of. The door swung open and Ronan flicked water off his hands at Adam.

"Towel's clean," Adam said, gesturing to the green hand towel hanging in a silver ring by the toothbrush mug. Ronan put his wet hands on Adam's head and grinned.

"You are such a shitbag," Adam said.

"Yeah," Ronan agreed and Adam stomped on his foot. "Oh, you do not want to start this."

Foot Stomp was the world's dumbest and least creatively named game, which Ronan and Noah had invented one boring Tuesday months ago when Ronan was super drunk. Noah's skill at stomping was limited to turning someone else's toes very, very cold. As soon as they taught Adam the game the number of bruises inherent in any given match went way up.

Adam had a trick move, devised after he'd watched some pro soccer where two players, one from England and one from Germany, fell, legs haphazardly entwined. He assumed neither player had intentionally wound up in that pile, but he trusted his pointy knee sweep -- an homage, soon to be patented -- was one of the few ways he could literally level the playing field against Ronan, who was half an inch taller than he was.

He dodged one stomp and attempted another. Ronan's clammy hands caught his elbows. Adam yelped and brought up his right knee in retaliation.

It was easier when there was a mattress to fall onto.

The game evolved from stomping to wrestling -- phase II maneuvers! -- and for the bonus round pajama pants were wadded up and pitched toward the laundry basket by the bathroom door. The distance wasn't great but pajama pants had terrible aerodynamics. Ronan concentrating on his shot -- he missed -- allowed Adam to get the jump on him. Also literally.

"Ah-ha!" Adam said, pining Ronan down at the hips.

"No one says 'Ah-ha!' Not even comic book movie villains," Ronan said. He didn't look that upset about being conquered.

"Shut up," Adam said. He'd have been a millionaire if he'd bet on the next thing out of Ronan's mouth.

"Make me," Ronan said.

It was clichéd and it was a challenge, one Adam was more than equipped to meet. Which was also clichéd, though that didn't render the results less enjoyable.

Forty-five minutes passed before his alarm clock went off. Ronan threw a pillow at it.

"Don't break that," Adam said around a yawn. He was drifting in afterglow, or some manlier variant of afterglow. The thought of having to stand up and go to the auto shop for six hours was depressing. "Some of us have to use it every single morning."

"Some of you should quit one or three of your twenty-two jobs and get a life already."

"Asshat," Adam said mildly.

Ronan traced his fingertips down Adam's right shoulder blade and left a kiss there. "Shower?" It was only one word but seemed to contain a lot of questions.

Adam turned over and looked up into Ronan's face. No hint of smirkiness now. "Come with?"

"Sure."

Not gonna be on time for work today, he thought a few minutes later, even though there were no voices whispering in the water. The shower tile was chilly against Adam's back, and Ronan's mouth was hot on Adam's collarbone, his sternum, the skin above his navel, and just this once being on time didn't matter.

 

The thing was, if Adam thought about it, he couldn't think about it.

Like, he was thinking about it right now, alone in his room, ten o'clock at night. Not a single one of the words would come to him.

For instance, the word 'come,' which contained more than one acceptable definition. He was blushing with no-one in the room; his eyes were shut, his arm was flung over his eyes, and the word come was almost enough to undo him.

There were guys who had plenty of words for what he and-- You know. He and. And. Ronan Lynch.

Mr. Ronan Lynch, Greywarren.

Adam thought about this: it made Ronan sound like a fancy, scary lawyer.

Which: maybe he would be, one day. Ronan did know a lot of Latin.

(Ronan's solution to this dilemma, Adam knew well, would've been to skip directly to _Carmen_ 16\. Ah, the marvels of hendecasyllabic meter! The sort that might get a private school student banned from Latin class for eternity, if their sociopath teacher hadn't already gone missing.)

But English words. Descriptions. Facts, even. Plain facts.

He and Ronan had. Had. Done some stuff. More than a few times.

Stuff sounded right. Adam let his arm fall to the side. He opened his eyes and squinted at his room's nubbly ceiling.

It's not like we're getting married or like either of us need to see a gynecologist, or talk about one. (There you go, brain, thanks for that.) We're sort of...on the other end of that spectrum, geez.

Golly gee. Gee whiz. Boy howdy. Aw shucks. Hoo boy.

Holy fuck.

Adam sighed, scratched his ear. He'd recently, briefly, ridden a magical furry deer-beast; he could commune with trees via rocks. He would not be outdone by simple vocabulary. He inhaled for ten Mississippi's and exhaled for ten Mississippi's and put his palms on his cheeks. Okay, the blushing hadn't stopped. May as well think them. Here we go.

Oy. Hrm. Auuugh.

Probably if he was too immature to say them he was too immature to touch them. Touch them, or do them, or touch or do them. A+ reasoning. Come again when you're braver.

Oh my god, Adam thought. I do not actually have this dirty a mind. That's the whole point. Or maybe it wasn't dirty-dirty, like porn hotline dirty, but it wasn't--

And, like. And furthermore.

Moreover: there were a lot of other things Adam should have been thinking about. More important things, like sleeping kings, supernatural forests, circular time, the ley line he could feel in his pulse. Gansey's dying, or hopefully not dying, if words didn't fail Adam there as well. Dangerous men and dangerous women, not necessarily dangerous in the same ways for the same reasons. Unsettling things, like assassins or collectors or Noah. Boring things, like college applications. Things that at the very least would not make him blush.

(Would not make him moan.)

And, and, shouldn't they talk about it? He and Ronan equaling they, and all those words/deeds Adam couldn't put his mind around equaling it. It, whatever it was, reminded Adam of the shifting piece of Cabeswater Ronan kept at the Barns. Maybe _it_ was equally wrong, or out of place, something that needed to be kept hidden in a blanket.

Plus, wasn't it worth discussing the whole _Is this a good idea_ aspect, not to mention the _What if we ruin our friendship_ _(with each other or Blue, Noah, or Gansey in any combination)_ risk and the _Jesus we're both kinda screwed up, there's a trail of damage behind us, and probably in front of us, that's laden with more rusting shrapnel than all of Kavinsky's torched Mitsubishis times infinity_ issue?

Adam had yet to feel bad about Kavinsky per se, but he thought someday he would admit he should, like when he was a sage old man, filled with empathetic wisdom and gallstones. But he mostly didn't want to ever think about Kavinsky, in particular alongside any thought that contained Ronan--

As though Ronan was containable in a single thought.

Adam flopped his arm back over his face. He'd ended up ten minutes late to Boyd's. "Dockin' you ten minutes pay and pray don't let it happen again," Boyd had drawled, miming horror with a dismayed grimace before grinning like he'd heard there was a fourteen car pileup on the interstate.

Adam worked an hour over anyway, plus five hours at the factory. Consequently he was tired. Not unusually tired but normal tired; sometimes that was more tired than Adam could take. It would explain why words were so difficult.

He dismissed the single knock on his door as wind or bug or imagination. The second knock was unobtrusive but more complicated -- shave and a haircut three times fast. He was tired and having this stupid trouble with words and greeting Ronan hello was outside the realm of his abilities at the moment.

If Ronan took it personally, he didn't show it.

Adam wanted to say, _How're Gansey and Noah_ or _Have you talked to Blue lately_ or _Never drink the tea Maura gives you_ or _Do we have anything due in Macroeconomics tomorrow_ , and managed to say exactly nothing. Nadda zilch zero.

He was concentrating instead on unzipping Ronan's jeans. Ronan was preoccupied taking off Adam's t-shirt. We're too busy to talk, Adam thought, pulling Ronan toward the mattress.

Everyone feels like this at the beginning, right? All this lit-up lust like a lightning strike, but eventually it wears off or cools down or fades away and we can go back to being able to be around each other without wanting to have this?

Or _having_ to have this.

Now Adam was biting down on Ronan's thigh, which helped one thing much too well and some other things not at all. Ronan's gasp and skin were delicious and salty: none of those words were sufficient.

That was the core frustration, Adam thought. He could say tickle, caress or kiss, or even suck, thrust, lick or cock. He could say how his throat opened or how Ronan's fingers twisted in his hair, explicit replays of the myriad ways they'd taken each other apart the first time and every time since, but Adam was convinced there was no language equal to the acts.

Maybe words weren't enough to describe how being saved felt.

 

_Sunday_

Around 7 a.m., when Adam should have been awake and studying for an hour already, Ronan flicked his ear, said something about changing mass, and left for Monmouth. Sleep fuddled, it took Adam a good five minutes to figure out Ronan had said changing _for_ mass, as in Mass, not as in Ronan was suddenly interested in variable-mass systems.

...Though building and gleefully blowing up a series of homemade rockets had been the rare physics class project Ronan had aced.

(It occurred to Adam that Ronan had probably dreamt them.)

Between 8:20 and 8:25 Adam stood under a dribbling lukewarm spray, washing his hair and listening to Cabeswater mutter. It sounded a bit like Cabeswater was divided on what it (they?) would like Adam to do. He scryed in the sink and turned over three tarot cards on the toilet lid: nothing definitive coagulated. He decided to leave Cabeswater to debate amongst itself; he knew Cabeswater would seek his undivided attention when it had made up its mind.

At 8:50, Adam could hear the sounds of St. Agnes's parishioners arriving for services: cars squeaking and rumbling in the parking lot, the occasional yelp from a kid, Madge the organist playing scales.

Here was something important Adam should consider: everything St. Agnes stood for. He wondered if scyring and tarot readings voided his lease. The Lynch brothers sitting together in a pew downstairs was, some mornings, on par with burning bushes and healed lepers. Adam had never asked Ronan what he believed, theology wise, and Ronan had never offered to enlighten him.

No. This was not something Adam could think about either.

At 9:30, Madge's somewhat tortured rendition of "Ave Maria" was making everything in his room quiver. The only reason he heard Ronan knock was because he was standing right by the door, searching for his favorite grey hoodie in the small collection of grey hoodies hanging on his white plastic wall-mounted coat hooks.

Ronan came in fast, untying his silk neck tie and flinging it on the floor like it was a writhing rattler. All of Adam's hoodies combined hadn't cost as much as that tie. Ronan's eyebrows had an agitated let's-set-off-a-dream-rocket look about them.

"What happened?" Adam asked. He didn't want to sound wary, but Ronan valued honesty.

Ronan tossed his leather boots into a corner. He did everything but shred the dress shirt off his own back, untucking the tail, unbuttoning buttons, rolling up sleeves. He scrubbed a hand over his head, sat down heavily on the end of Adam's mattress, rubbed the back of his neck.

"Sometimes it's," he trailed off, studying nothing -- or, rather, unfocused as though he was purposely not looking at Adam.

A single realization carved itself into Adam's mind. He walked over and stood in front of Ronan. When Ronan looked up at him the set of his mouth seemed to confirm the nausea pooling in Adam's stomach.

We should've talked about a lot of things, Adam thought, but oh well. His hands were numb.

Be brave.

"About...this," he said. "Whatever this has been. Us, I mean."

Ronan's expression went from regretful to confused.

Adam continued, "I guess we shouldn't. Keep. You know. We shouldn't." It seemed impossible again to form the thought.

"What," Ronan said, shaking his head.

"I don't want to be the reason you can't sit in that chapel," Adam said. But for the accent he would not have recognized his own too empty voice. The person speaking sounded sad. He swallowed and made himself look Ronan in the eye. "I don't want to be a sin you have to confess every week."

Ronan stood up, inhaling like he'd been belted, his eyes shining and dark. He looked grieved, Adam thought. For a terrible beat he wondered if _he_ had hit Ronan, the way he'd kicked the box he used as a nightstand -- or had used -- in front of Blue with a rage he hadn't felt until he was standing on the other side of it.

But no, he had managed to injure Ronan without raising his voice or his hand.

Adam felt something splinter in his chest. He didn't think he'd ever be able to take a breath without wounding himself on it. He watched Ronan and Ronan watched him, unmoving, for a long moment.

"I left early because Declan pissed me off, which is to say he was being Declan," Ronan began, uncharacteristically quiet. "And Matthew reeked of Axe body spray like he'd bathed in a freaking vat of it and I love him but it was giving me a fucking headache." He reached out and wiped something wet from beneath Adam's right eye with his thumb. "And I've heard that shitty watered-down homily about the loaves and the fishes like twenty times. It's not even the right season for Passover."

He said this last bit in such a smarter-than-thou tone Adam almost laughed. Ronan's hand was cupping his jaw, thumb sweeping back and forth atop Adam's cheekbone as if to soothe him to sleep. Adam made himself respond.

"So," he said, wondering if there should have been a question mark at the end of the vowel.

"So," Ronan said, eyes lowered beneath the fringe of his black eyelashes. "Don't worry about why I left early today, loser." The insult was blunted by how affectionately he said the word, and by how distracted his focus was otherwise. He was watching his own thumb as he swept it over Adam's cheekbone and traced it across Adam's lower lip.

The touch was like a shock of static electricity, both instantaneous and as if time slowed to an infinitesimal crawl: Adam felt heat spark into his fingers, along his ribcage, down the backs of his legs and into the soles of his bare feet. He took a breath the second before Ronan's mouth covered his.

The kiss was soft, nearly tentative, and stayed that way until Ronan broke it off gently to gather Adam up in his arms, like he was fearless, like he had no idea Adam was something he could razor himself with. Adam listened to Ronan's heartbeat and tried to imagine being the sort of person who deserved to be held.

"Wanna go throw Noah out a window?" Ronan whispered after a minute.

Adam did laugh then, though it was more of a hiccup. He pulled away a little. "Could we go for breakfast instead?" Amazingly, the drugstore's pancakes were better than their tuna sandwiches.

"Fucking yes," Ronan said and went to retrieve his boots. While Adam tied a knot in his sneaker's shoelace, Ronan said, "Everything's gonna be okay."

"How do you know?" Adam asked, genuinely curious. Ronan sounded so certain.

Ronan shrugged. "I'm smarter than you are."

Possibly true. Still, Adam would take victory where he could. When they left his room, he was winning Foot Stomp, 3-2.

**Author's Note:**

> alternate story title _It's Not a Real Sport Until Someone Breaks a Toe_ y/n?


End file.
